


Operation (actual) Friendship

by stateofintegrity



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27286741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stateofintegrity/pseuds/stateofintegrity
Summary: After Klinger's nose heals (in the episode Operation Friendship) he tries to make Charles into a friend.
Relationships: Maxwell Klinger/Charles Emerson Winchester III
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Operation (actual) Friendship

**Author's Note:**

> Several folks helped me think through the notes here: annikat, sergeantsparky, and peaceloveandjocularity. If I forgot any contributors, please let me know!

Following the return to wellness of one Maxwell Q. Klinger, his attending physician suffered a good deal of ribbing. It began with Hawkeye’s observation that Winchester’s clothes looked slept in but his bunk had not been… and it went on for weeks. 

“You ought to just sleep with him,” BJ suggested one morning after OR. “You’re getting the grief. Might as well get the gravy.” 

Winchester just sighed. 

***

It was late when Charles passed through the hospital to the main office where Klinger was at work over a pile of requisition forms, trying to determine what had come in and what had been gobbled up by the black market and what had never been sent in the first place. He looked up when Charles came in. His face was tired but happy. 

“Hiya, Major.”

Charles touched his face to examine it and announced that it was healing well. 

“Thanks for taking care of me. You were really sweet.” 

“Thank you. That would be more of a compliment if you sounded less shocked about it.”

Klinger shrugged. “I guess I just kinda wish you’d just been nice to me instead of doing it because you thought you owed me is all.”

This was completely unexpected. “Meaning what?”

“I think you’d be a good friend. But you won’t go for it. I tried before.”

“You did?” Charles sounded amused, faintly patronizing. 

“Yeah. When you first got here I said we should be pals. Wasn’t good enough for you. But you made me tea and everything while I was hurt, so maybe you changed your mind? Or was it just an obligation? ‘Cause I’m not all that crazy about being one of those.” 

Charles could well understand that. He often felt like little more at the 4077th. Perhaps Klinger’s musings deserved to be humored. “I have, at times, insulted you rather mercilessly. You think that a basis for a friendship between us exists despite this?”

“Why not? The Captains rag on each other all the time. They don’t mean it. Unless maybe you always have… but I really don’t think so, sir.”

_ Fascinating.  _ “Oh? Why not?”

“You call me by my name.”

“What would you have me call you?”

Klinger shrugged, scuffed a saddle shoe, Charles was amused to see. “No one else does, is all. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you, but I like hearing it. You said I could call you Charles.”

He had. But the way Klinger said it, shyly, looking down… it sounded like a  _ romantic _ proposition, which he had not intended. But that wasn’t possible. Klinger wore dresses, certainly, but that was as far as it went. 

“And of what would this newfound friendship consist?”

Tired as he was, Klinger shot him an almost scolding look. “Friend stuff, Major. Geez. Don’t you have friends?” 

Charles really didn’t. “Friends typically have a common ground, a common interest,” he suggested. 

“We’re not that different. We both want out of here.”

“ _ Everyone _ wants out of here.” 

“Not like us.” He paused, and Charles could see he was organizing evidence as he’d just been organizing supplies. “And we both have things we use to block it out. Your music, my sewing. You don’t hassle me about my clothes, either - that’s plenty friendly of you right there.”

“You did save my life,” Charles murmured aloud. 

“We work good together, sir. Even if I did forget the hamper.”

Charles ignored the last. “Do we?” But he remembered the windstorm, the cave. And suddenly he was looking at a lonely kid who had never been farther away from home than the corner store. Klinger didn’t have his education - nothing could have prepared him for the sight of bodies being hacked open. If anyone needed a friend in this awful place, it was this young man. 

“What else do friends do?” he heard himself ask. 

“They talk. They learn about each other. They hang out.”

Just a few hours ago, if someone had proposed  _ learning  _ about Maxwell Q. Klinger, Charles would have chortled. What was there to know? Now, however… now the physician decided to build, if he could, a bulwark against the younger man’s terror and loneliness. 

“When it is not terrifying, this place can be dreadful dull. What if, in service to Operation Friendship, we exchange questions and answers throughout the day? It will give us something to do.” 

Klinger gave him a puzzled look. “How?” 

Winchester tapped the pencil near at hand. “You bring the mail anyway. Bring me the questions you’d have me answer.” 

Thinking that it sounded like fun (and getting Charles’ promise that he wouldn’t laugh at his spelling), Klinger agreed. 

***

The initial queries surprised the surgeon. 

They probably should not have - but it had been a really long time since someone had cared to know about him on this level… and the eraser marks told him that Klinger had put some thought into this. The clerk had written, in passable cursive: 

  1. You know about classic music, so if you were trying to get someone to like it, what song would you play first?



Aside from clearly meaning “classical,” it was precisely the sort of question he and Honoria liked to trade over dinner, so he wrote that. 

A1: My parents gave me the privilege, as a boy, of speaking first at the dinner table, sharing details of my day. For this reason, as an adult, I try to speak of anything  _ but  _ my day over dinner - and this is just the kind of question I would wish to discuss. There are many pieces… but perhaps Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, the fourth movement… though if I were writing this in Boston instead of Korea, I might give another answer. 

For his question, he first wrote something self-serving (why would you want to be my friend?), but changed it to: Q2: Which of your many, intricate, fabric creations is your favorite? 

The answer came in with the mail the next day and Klinger smiled to hand it over. Charles read as the younger man returned to his rounds. 

A2: (Klinger had adopted his system): The one that gets me out!! 

Seriously, though, I used to have an outfit for the O Club. Black, sparkly dress, high heels, veiled hat, white gloves. But one night we went on duty and it was one of the casualties. What do you do? 

Charles thought he had an answer.  _ You get a present from your rich, new friend. That’s what.  _

The next question belonged to Charles and he sent it with his gift. Q3: Will you accompany me to the O Club in this?

A3: The Captains will laugh. I don’t want them to laugh at you. But thank you for helping me feel pretty. Q4: If you could have any job in the world without worrying what anyone else thought, what would you do?

Chuckling, Charles penned his fourth answer. A4: A knight. I used to play one with Honoria. 

***

Late one evening, Hawkeye Pierce found Maxwell bent over a new set of missives (a long OR had left little time to read them). “What are you studying, Klinger?”

“Answers, sir.”

“That’s Charles’ handwriting. He hiring you for chores again?”

“No. I ask him things and he gives me the answers.”

“Like what?” 

“Like his favorite stuff.”

“Why do you care?” Pierce reached for the missives. 

“Hey - hands off, sir.”

Hawkeye gave him a teasing look that knew way too much. “Awfully possessive.”

Klinger scowled, gathering the little letters. “I just want him to be my friend.” 

Hawk’s eyes didn’t change. “Is that all?”

“I’ll be lucky to get that without messing it up, so yeah.”

Hawk gripped his shoulder, the gesture of a friend. “Poor sad-eyes. You could’ve picked anyone to fall for.”

“Oh, you know me. Never the easy route, sir.”

As he left him to his miniature letters, filled with such Winchester trivia as favorite foods and places the Major had traveled to, Hawkeye hoped Klinger’s section eight might come through. Escape via section eight seemed far more likely than Charles ever allowing the Corporal to mean anything to him.

***

Hawkeye was a crusader at heart. He kept an eye on the burgeoning friendship between the two, but he didn’t know about Charles’ secret wish to be a knight. When Hawkeye teased Klinger about his affection for the thoracic surgeon, Winchester stepped in, cornering his tentmate.

“Do not do that to him.”

“What?”

“Joke like that.” 

“You’re his protector now?” Hawkeye challenged. 

“I am his friend.”

“Well,  _ friend _ Charles, you could be a hell of a lot more than that.”

“I thought we retired this skit a few weeks ago.”

_ “That _ was a joke. So, let me say with utmost seriousness that you’d better be careful. If you are his friend, you can’t drop him as soon as you hit the States or you’ll break his whole damn heart. You might end up doing it anyway.”

“Perhaps not.”

Hawk froze. “You’re interested?”

“You think I would share such a thing with you? Prior to sharing it with him? Shoo.”

“You’re going to go for it?”

“Shoo,” Charles repeated. He had a new note to write.

Klinger’s most recent ask had been: "What do you think of at 2:41AM when you can’t sleep?" 

He knew that the clerk found it difficult to sleep in a warzone, that he was often haunted by nightmares.

Winchester sent back an answer that was the entire truth, though it had not been even a month ago.

He wrote just five words - gentle as the opening of a poem: 

"Kissing the inside of your wrist." 

And then he waited.

After that, Maxwell’s notes became really quite fun. 

“Will Honoria like me?” he wrote early in their courtship. 

Holding him, kissing his dark hair, Charles promised she would. 

Sometimes the funny little missives contained Max’s fears about how he would fit into Charles’ world. The Major especially chuckled over, “Do I have to learn table settings?” 

For his part, Max enjoyed a hastily (hungrily?) scrawled, “Will you show me the green satin? Everyone speaks so highly of it.” 

Max showed him; it looked great on - but it looked  _ amazing _ draped over the back of a chair. 

The next note Charles sent got an audible expression of delight - and he stuck around to hear the answer. It read, “What do you want to be married in?” 

“Half a dozen different outfits,” Klinger chirped. “The groom can have a boutonnière for each one. Are you asking me, Major?”

“On paper? Heavens no. Merely planning.” 

Max’s next note asked, “How long will you love me?”

That one, the Major answered with a ring and a question of his own, “Maxwell al-Qurhah Klinger, my dearest friend, may I cherish you forever?”

In the end, it turned out there was something that friends did that Maxwell had left out of his original list: they loved each other for their entire lives.

End! 

  
  
  
  
  



End file.
